Over the Great Wall
“May you live in interesting times” goes the well-known Chinese blessing or, depending on your outlook, curse. For Robin Yates, the mid-sixties could scarcely have been boring as he embarked on a BA at Oxford in Chinese archaeology. “No one studies China,” his high school teachers had chided him, attempting to steer him back toward the Latin and Greek they knew. But “the more they told me I shouldn’t study it, the more I wanted to!” recalls Yates with his characteristic easy laugh.
Only once he arrived at Oxford did he learn that over in China, the word “interesting” was being redefined. In addition to the social and political upheavals that marked Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution (1966-76), all archaeological work had been abandoned and artifacts from the longest continuous civilization the planet has seen were being destroyed. Two weeks after beginning his studies, Yates switched to Chinese poetry.